Design of pulsed scanning lidar without mutual interferences

Abstract

With the growing number of autonomous vehicles equipped with pulsed scanning LIDAR operating close to each other at the same time, one pulsed scanning LIDAR might receive laser pulses from other pulsed scanning LIDAR. The reception of unwanted laser pulses from other pulsed scanning LIDAR is called mutual interference. Due to Lambertian reflectance of the laser pulse, a mixture of incoherent laser pulses arrives at each pixel from different paths apart from the direct path. This effects cause significant distortions in the estimation of depth, especially near corners and convex areas of the scene. We proposed a new pulsed scanning LIDAR, which measures a scene without mutual interference. The emitted pulse of each pixel is modulated pulses by direct sequence optical code division multiple access (DS-OCDMA) techniques. The modulated pulses include unique device identification number (ID), the pixel position in the line, and checksum. It emits the modulated pulse, and receives the return light to the detector. We modeled the entire of the pulsed scanning LIDAR operation in the RSoft OptSim and validated the results obtained in modeling and simulation.